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Friends of Los Gatos Creek volunteer Lupe Perez clears out camouflaged tent in a small homeless encampment during a cleanup along the Los Gatos Creek, in San Jose, on Saturday, Jan. 11, 2014. The Friends of Los Gatos Creek is a volunteer campaign organized by Steve Holmes to clean up the creek, educate community members and attempt to restore the salmon population. (LiPo Ching/Bay Area News Group)

During a Friends of Los Gatos Creek volunteer cleanup, Steve Holmes starts clearing out the trash in a small homeless encampment along the Los Gatos Creek, in San Jose, on Saturday, Jan. 11, 2014. Holmes, a sport fisherman, formed the Friends of Los Gatos Creek as a volunteer campaign to clean up the creek, educate community members and attempt to restore the salmon population. (LiPo Ching/Bay Area News Group)

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Aurelia Sanchez, 61, picks up litter on the corner of S. Ninth St. and Keyes St. in San Jose, Calif. on Monday, Jan. 13, 2014. Sanchez cleans the sidewalks and park near her home twice a week to help control the blight in her neighborhood. She is a volunteer for the city's anti-litter program. The nearby "Jungle" homeless encampment and new housing developments has greatly contributed to the amount of trash left on the streets where she has lived for the past 30 years. (Gary Reyes/Bay Area News Group)

SAN JOSE — It’s difficult to say exactly when city and county leaders began ceding local creeks and streams to encampments of the luckless, dispossessed and often mentally ill people who cling to their banks. But by the beginning of last year the surrender was almost complete.

In the heart of Silicon Valley, the Guadalupe River, Coyote Creek and Los Gatos Creek had become filaments of filth, a river of garbage and human waste brought forth by “a tsunami of homelessness,” as one advocate for the people who occupy those encampments described it. Coyote Creek, once coursing with chinook salmon and steelhead trout, became so choked with Styrofoam containers, discarded sleeping bags and batteries leaking acid that the resulting trash raft was visible from space on Google Earth.

What began as a case of benign neglect — talking about criminality associated with homelessness was viewed with disdain, and elected officials were able to ignore the problem because encampments impacted only small pockets of their districts — quietly grew into an eyes wide shut public policy, with $1.67 million of the city’s budget this year devoted to encampment cleanups. They remove trash, but leave behind the people living in squalor.

After years of being collateral damage in the city’s halfhearted war on homeless encampments, the people in neighborhoods surrounding the shanty camps began an organized resistance movement. Friends of Los Gatos Creek, an all-volunteer group formed a year ago by Steve Holmes, a recreational fisherman, attacks hot spots once a month and so far has hauled 50 tons of trash from the creek’s banks and bridges. “It’s sad that the people who are least capable of caring for themselves have been given responsibility for the stewardship of our creeks,” Holmes says.

In the past three years, Santa Clara County’s unsheltered population has grown to fifth-largest in the nation, with the highest percentage of homeless veterans anywhere. At a board meeting of the water district in January, the county’s director of homeless systems, Ky Le, told officials gathered to discuss the encampment problem, “We are leading the nation in most categories of homelessness.”

Phil Hood has looked out his window at midnight and seen naked men covered in mud from Los Gatos Creek walking down the street in his Delmas Park neighborhood. He hates the predicament the encampments have brought about — not the people who live in them. “There’s nothing that says we’re being compassionate by letting people live under bridges,” he says.

Aurelia Sanchez has lived on the same street in Spartan Keyes for more than 30 years, and she has seen it disintegrate since the city began turning a blind eye to the Coyote Creek encampment known as the Jungle. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like her street anymore.

“They’re becoming so entrenched, it’s almost like it’s their neighborhood,” she says of the homeless people who emerge from the encampment — believed to be one of the nation’s largest, with about 300 humans and at least that many cats and dogs — to panhandle and use local facilities. “It really makes me want to move and give up. We’re losing ground, losing hope. It’s just very sad.”

Two years ago, Sanchez was the city’s Litter Volunteer of the Year, and she still dutifully sets out from her South 9th Street home two days of every week with a large trash bag, picking up the debris that disfigures her once tidy neighborhood. “I used to enjoy doing litter pickup,” she says. “I don’t anymore. The stuff they leave behind is unbelievable.” At a small business around the corner from Sanchez, an employee confided that he frequently cleans human waste off the sidewalk. He told Sanchez, “I didn’t sign up for this.”

Nobody did. Homeless encampments were already a festering boil on the city’s backside when the local Resource Conservation District filed a politely worded petition with the city, the Santa Clara Valley Water District and the state Department of Fish and Game to remove them from Coyote Creek and the Guadalupe River because they caused “substantial pollution” and “interference with public use and enjoyment” of waterways.

That was nine years ago. The damage has been catastrophic to fish, beavers and plant life since that official pleading was filed, and it was largely to protect the endangered trout and salmon that a warden from the renamed California Fish and Wildlife Department last week filed a formal complaint with state water regulators against the city for washing its hands of the problem.

Anger about petty crimes committed by residents of homeless encampments has become a much more public part of the discussion. “Whether it’s stealing bikes, breaking into homes or vehicles, drug use, prostitution, extortion — a lot of bad things are going on,” says Holmes. “And because no one is policing the encampments, they know this is an area where they can act out.” To fight back, Holmes formed his volunteer group. And he recently waged a successful campaign with park rangers to prevent most re-encampment.

The cleanups create their own set of problems. When an encampment beneath the Leigh Bridge on Los Gatos Creek was broken up recently, piles of equipment marked as the property of a nearby school were found. The people who had been living at the campsite simply moved a few yards downstream to Ben Koo’s front door. “I was completely shocked that they were allowed to walk away from that with no criminal charges,” Koo says. “Those people are homeless, but they’re also part of a criminal element. There were arguments about drugs, arguments about stolen property. It’s kind of harrowing when you’re about to leave, and you can hear people behind the bushes, drinking and socializing, and you know they’re tied to a homeless encampment that had a lot of stolen goods.”

At a campsite along Coyote Creek, near the ball fields at the Tully Community Branch Library, the hardscrabble homeless sometimes drift into the midst of Spartan Little League games. “They’ll walk through and they’re smoking around the kids, or going through garbage cans, or they’re in the dugouts while the games are going on,” says Steve Kilby, who runs the league. “I leave the bathrooms open for parents, and they’re in the bathrooms stripping down naked, washing themselves. And I’ve got little kids going into those bathrooms. I just can’t have that. Other leagues won’t even come over to our fields because of that issue. And I can’t blame them.”

Despite all the resources spent reducing the homeless population, says Ray Bramson, the city’s homelessness response team manager, “Encampments will persist. I think the idea of ending homelessness certainly is a lofty goal, but it’s a vision, not a mission.”

It remains the vision of Destination: Home, which began its Housing 1,000 campaign in 2011, and has since moved about 620 people into permanent homes. Executive Director Jennifer Loving says it will take 3,000 affordable housing units — and an investment of half a billion dollars — to eliminate encampments in Santa Clara County.

“I don’t blame the neighbors for being angry,” Loving says. “I would be so angry. Nobody wants this in their backyard. But the anger they feel is about bad people, and we need to be angry about the system.”

Mostly, that anger is free-floating, like trash in the creeks. And both are rising.

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